The majority of oil consumption is not by cars, but the transport industry (ships, planes) and plastics. Better replacements for those are not in the horizon yet.
If we take the US, which consumes 21% of all petroleum, to understand oil usage pattern, we can see that 47% of US consumption is from petrol (gasoline). Second is Distillate fuel (diesel and heating oil), which accounts for 21%; this is used for industrial machines and heavy motor vehicles, trains, boats etc (diesel) and for industrial heating (heating oil) [1].
These two accounts for the vast majority of consumption (47 +21 = 68%).
The percentage used by transport sector has been increasing [2] over the years:
2013 63.8
2004 57.7
1973 45.4
Source: [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=oil_use [2] https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/oecdoi...
About 6% each aviation and shipping.
About 8% plastics and manufacturing, plus more to non-energy uses.
Some generation, residential, and commercial use (much of it heating).
About half to all road transport (1865 Mtoe of 3744 Mtoe). I belive that's about 2:1 private autos vs. lorries.
Oil as chemical feedstocks is fairly substitutable -- an alternative hydrocarbon source, or carbon from, say, limestone, might substitute. Oil as long-distance transport fuel, most especially in aviation, not so much. Shipping once moved by wind, and might again. Overland electrically-sourced rail and possibly trucks might work.
I've got my doubts on the scalability of battery-operated vehicles, though progress to date has been fairly impressive.
Rocketry is another hard-to-substitute option. RP-1 is highly-refined kerosene, and by volume, your best bet. (Hydrogen packs a bigger punch by weight, but requires far larger tanks and cryogenics.) Solid rocket motors tend toward hydrocarbon sources. SpaceX relies on RP-1.
http://www.iea.org/sankey/#?c=World&s=Final consumption
Actually, much worse: 46 MJ/kg for kero, 19.6 MJ/kg for methanol.
Presumably liquefied. 53.6 MJ/kg at your link.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/3161/why-is-spacex...
2004 technical paper out of Germany:
Too much blood in my caffeine system.
Worse by volume, even liquified: 22.2 KJ/l vs. 37.4 KJ/l kero. Though the mass savings should trade that off some as well.
Limestone offers that.
I'm not particularly versed in what the chemistry would look like, but if the interest is in, say, providing carbon to coking processes (allowing a non-energy carbon source to be combined with, say, direct solar thermal or electrically-provided heat), which accounts for about 15% of all present coal usage, then you're onto something.
I'm aware that limestone was considered for Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis based on nuclear-generated electricity, at Brookhaven National Labs in the 1960s (Meyer Steinberg, I believe, I've written on this and documented much of the literature at https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius).
For plastics, etc., the situation's largely similar.
I suspect limestone, based on fossilised shellfish, is more abundant than coal, based on fossilised plant matter, given that conditions for limestone formation are probably easier to come by. For non-energy use, this might be a viable long-term option.
And, yes, burning limestone-originated carbon, in the synfuel instance, would be similarly problematic as burning coal is in terms of increasing atmospheric and oceanic CO2 (and carbonate/bicarbonate) levels. I'm mentioning the research interest, not endorsing it. More recent research along those lines looks at carbon recovery from seawater, or possibly atmospheric carbon, though the latter is vastly more energy intensive.
Note: cargo ships don't use gasoline.
Of course such material doesn't exist etc